Live long enough and, eventually, you’ll occasionally be skipping the op-eds, the comics, and the horoscope, and go straight to the Death Announcements.
Back when the pages of the Guardian would almost cover the average dining table, Uncle Vin would open the newspaper out wide, and we’d be reading it upside down from the other side so as not to be a bother.
He would call Grandma and ask whether she remembered “Mr This” or “Mrs That” and they would try to guess the ages of the children and the schools they attended or the jobs they had.
It was not regularly the case that any of this mattered to the grands. In the fine print, would only sometimes come a familiar name in “the grandfather or grandmother of …” column.
Then, one day, many years later, I saw the picture of someone I thought I knew. It was him alright. We’d counseled at vacation camp together. We also once reunited as members of opposing cricket teams in Sangre Grande and vowed to keep in touch… which we never did.
But there he was, in black and white. A tentative passport smile. Eyes open wide as under the torture of an impatient photographer.
Not long after, my close friend Dana died suddenly. We’d limed together the night before and decided on ambitious strategies to stop smoking cigarettes.
Obituaries, my camp/cricket friend, and Dana later converged as a single emotion when, at Radio 610, I discreetly protested the preparation of obituaries in the newsroom.
It was not about matters of death but, putatively, departmental intrusion—as if in our newscasts we did not already read aloud the names, ages, and addresses of those who’d been murdered or killed in car accidents or had died by suicide. The motion was denied.
I have, many years later, gone to the coldly titled “Report of the Commission of Enquiry Appointed to Enquire into the Events Surrounding the Attempted Coup D’état of 27th July 1990” more than once to find people.
There are nine identified victims. The rest are namelessly included in “Table 4”—15 (from gunshots) at POS General Hospital; seven at the Red House (2 Police, 1 Muslimeen and 4 “others”); one (Muslimeen) at TTT and one sentry at Police Headquarters.
There are grounds for doubting the summary number - an exercise as urgent as telling the stories of those who died in 1990. And to do so to render the tragedy less susceptible to the vagaries of folkloric untruth or the transformation of victims into casualties of some kind of post-facto noble deed/s.
Today, death once more has become a single story confronted by daily figures, statistics, and graphs (understandably) without names. One COVID-denier who has silently retreated and is now a pathetic anti-vaxxer posted last week on social media that all this great fuss about the pandemic was over an infinitely small number of people who have died “from the virus” (a disease once openly described by the same creep as fictional).
Attached to that claim was a small, unverified statistic. There was, instead, an implicit meaning of divine or natural injunction. “They woulda dead anyway.” This is, after all, a required culling of the herd in the process of determining the survival of only the fittest.
This is not the best way to greet someone who now often skips the features pages and what the sports pages offer. It is the kind of thing that invites rage.
These days, and unlike Uncle Vin’s clumsy broadsheet, the app stares back brightly at you. There are colour photographs and, sometimes, substantial biographies. You try to match the ministry’s online “dashboard” with names and ages you actually know.
There are statistics, like Gloria’s, more difficult to find. Only that you know her son could not awaken her from troubled sleep – her breathing more laboured with each passing day.
Gail, though, helped change the Couva graph one tragically anticipated morning. You wondered then whether the anger you felt was not what flows naturally from the inevitability you wished you had the power to change, and not the rage deliverable to those who rail against reality.
Live long and wide enough and you’d understand that death is not to be denied. Those grinning in the darkness of privilege and outright ignorance reside on pages to be quickly turned. I can think of far less charitable options.